It's 10:34 a.m. on a Tuesday. The teacher frantically tries to quiet 30 rambunctious high school freshmen. Laughs, shrieks and pencils fly around the classroom. Teacher turns his back to the class, annotating forgotten notes on the board. A pen slices through the air, missing his left ear by centimeters. He snaps around, "You five, outside NOW!" The five African American males in the class are banished to the hallway. A white boy threw the pen. Welcome to a typical day in ninth-grade biology.

I recently conducted an informal survey of my peers, inquiring about their experiences with discrimination in school. The survey was distributed to 98 14-to-18-year-olds who attend Oakland Technical High School. I hypothesized that students of color, especially males of color, would experience more discrimination than white students.

The harmful effects of racial discrimination in public education have been documented in the past, most notably by the Brown vs. Board of Education case in 1954.

Prior to that case, schools were legally racially segregated. Though the Brown decision was critical in shifting the legal and social landscape, we have yet to achieve true equality in the educational system. In post-Brown-ruling Los Angeles, for example, a two-tiered tracking system was introduced into the public schools: Mexicans and blacks were tracked into remedial and vocational classes, while whites and Asians were placed in academic classes.

In my survey, one-third of the students reported that this pattern is still seen through the limited diversity of Advanced Placement/High Potential classes at Oakland Tech. Elizabeth Humphries, a journalism/social justice teacher at Claremont Middle School in Oakland, says the level of parental education is the most reliable predictor of a child's academic success. Her point ties back to an age-old problem.

Before the Brown decision, many adults of color were illiterate. This meant that their children weren't being read to, putting them at a developmental disadvantage and making school extra hard and discouraging. These kids grow up, have their own children, project their own bias against schools, and the cycle repeats.

The African American males who were banished to the hall from the biology class participated in my survey. Shockingly, 4 out of 5 of them marked that they had never been discriminated against. That means either students weren't able to identify discriminatory actions, or that they were shamed into not admitting it. This sort of result showed up repeatedly in my data: 54 percent of the students surveyed indicated that they had never been discriminated against.

While the overall results were not as I expected, the answers of those who reported experiencing discrimination did fit with my predictions. Of those surveyed, 51 percent of minorities said they have experienced discrimination in school as compared to 23 percent of whites. The overwhelming gap seen here ties back to the problem the Brown case sought to address.

White students are no longer the majority in K-12 public schools across the country. The racial imbalance between teachers (the vast majority of whom are white) and students contributes to discrimination in education. We need to attain a more diverse pool of teachers who can encourage all students to succeed. Ms. Humphries phrased it shortly and sweetly - we have to "acknowledge the privilege, notice the patterns, sell the idea that there is discrimination in education;" then, with enough support, the much needed change will come.

Lucy Flattery-Vickness is a freshman at Oakland Technical High School.